After Losing Weight Where Does the Fat Go?

Find out where your fat disappears to

Do you ever wonder where your fat goes to when you lose weight? Does it just magically disappear? Some people may think that it gets burned off or that it gets turned into muscle. These two are common misconceptions and can’t be further than the truth.

The scientific reason on where the fat goes may surprise you and unless you already knew where most of it goes then it is not something you would normally think about. In fact it is something you do naturally all the time.

Read on to see if you guessed right to where the fat goes

Well, according to Andrew Brown from the University of New South Wales and Australian TV personality (slash former physicist) Ruben Meerman, when you lose weight, you exhale your fat. Their new calculations, based on existing knowledge about biochemistry, were published in the British Medical Journal.

“There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss,” Brown says “The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide,” Meerman adds. “It goes into thin air.”

Then the duo calculated the proportion of the mass stored in 10 kilograms of fat that exits as carbon dioxide and as water when we lose weight. By tracing the pathway of those atoms out of the body, they found that 8.4 of those kilograms are exhaled as carbon dioxide. Turns out, our lungs are the primary excretory organ for weight loss. The remaining 1.6 kilograms becomes water, which is excreted in urine, feces, sweat, breath, tears, and other bodily fluids.

Breathing more than required by a person’s metabolic rate leads to hyperventilation, followed by dizziness, palpitations, and loss of consciousness.